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Products applications, case studies & best practices It's a nightmare that facility operations teams dread. The team at Methodist Hospital in Minnesota is three and a half hours into a four-hour mandatory test of a critical power sys- tem when the monitoring and control system freezes. Real load falls below the required 30 percent. The team takes control manually and works through a time-consuming reboot. The only recourse — reschedule the entire test. Seared into the team's memory, the experience is one example of a power monitoring and control system past its prime. "Its operational defi ciencies in- cluded logging itself of , 'losing' a group of automatic transfer switches from its database and operating very slowly due to its serial communications," said Chris Liedman, operations manager of engineering and maintenance at Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital in Min- nesota. The 426-bed hospital, with more than 3,200 employees and about 950 staf physicians, is part of HealthPart- Methodist Hospital automates critical power management with ASCO Critical Power and the Digital Revolution POWER SYSTEMS ners, a consumer-governed, nonprofi t integrated healthcare and fi nancing organization. To ensure the hospital could depend on reliable critical power, the operations team decided to bring its critical power management process into the digital revolution with the help of Emerson Network Power's ASCO Power business. Satisfying the 'must haves' Their list of "must haves" for a new system included a proven track record of managing critical power for a multi-building campus. Other "must haves" were the ability to better manage multiple automatic transfer switches, the speed to quickly manage the volumes of data generated during tests and produce compliance reports automatically. Technically, system performance would need to include distributed processing, prioritized and dynamic data updating, dynamic throttling, diagnostic logging and 1000 Mbps Ethernet. In fact, the system needed to be able to monitor a range of critical power equipment and components, such as automatic transfer switches, paralleling control switchgear, gen-sets, multiple brands of circuit breakers, bus bars and other devices from dif erent manufacturers. System performance also would need power quality analytics to evaluate and diag- nose data so the team could make real-time decisions on day-to-day system operation. Issues 'a thing of the past' That was about a year ago. Today, Liedman and Facilities Manager Bill Tester report that problems with testing and managing critical power day to day are a thing of the past. The new sys- tem the hospital installed, the ASCO 5750 PowerQuest Critical Power Management System, meets the list of "must haves." Liedman said, "It responds in- stantaneously. The big win for us is automated reporting and trending. Before, everything was handwritten. Now, we generate reports that are tailored to meet the requirements of healthcare facilities so they're per- fect for our monthly run report." Trending shows power demand history so they know where they have adequate capacity and, more importantly, where they don't. They overlay that with future construc- tion plans, which help to project critical power system scaling to keep it in lock step with hospital growth and kW demand. They also can produce reports on bypass status, critical power settings, diagnostics, alarming and historical logs. Monitoring critical power 24/7 is a given, of course, so overnight the boiler operator relies on the power management's dynamic visualization to present information in an eas- ily understandable format. "The one thing to remember is that modern critical power management makes our regular duty easier," Tester explained. "It's more reli- able and secure." No more nightmares, just sweet dreams. Learn more at emersonnetworkpower.com. Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital St. Louis Park, Minn. EQUIPMENT ASCO 5750 PowerQuest Critical Power Management System — At left: Chris Liedman (left) and Bill Tester of Methodist Hospital, review a screen of the PowerQuest 5750 Critical Power Management System. MCDM AG.COM | M A RCH /A PR IL 2015 | Medical Construction & Design 61